Student spelunkers trade class work for caving

Celebrated cave explorer Floyd Collins became trapped in a narrow underground passageway while searching for a new entrance to Kentucky’s popular Mammoth Caves in 1925.

He died of exposure more than a week later, after the passageway that rescuers had been using to reach him collapsed.

Eighty-seven years later, a group of McMaster students has just finished exploring the same caves Collins frequented, including the Mammoth, now decidedly safer and even more popular.

“It’s true experiential learning,” says the Library’s acting director of maps, data and GIS John Maclachlan, who led 17 Integrated Science and Arts & Science students through four days of spelunking in the southern state. “It’s about actually seeing the world.”

The trip was a pilot “interdisciplinary experience” course that included visits to Mammoth, Cub Run and Hidden River caves. For the students involved, the experience included the chance to immerse themselves in situations they otherwise would never encounter.

The group spent hours underground, and were able to see cave-dwelling organisms such as bats and eyeless crayfish up-close.

“There’s something to be said for going to a new environment, going underground and actually exploring something,” said Brianna Smrke, an Arts & Science student who went on the trip. “It was all very new for me, but being able to look at some of the cave formations was incredibly meaningful.”

Those formations included limestone stalactites that take a century to grow just one cubic centimetre.

“It was crazy just trying to cram all that awe into your mind,” said Arts & Science student Sam Godfrey. “It was amazing.”

Before the trip, the students were tasked with preparing a report on some aspect of the Kentucky caves. Topics included Collins’ explorations, the bat-killing fungal disease known as white-nose syndrome, and the “Cave Wars” – the Depression-era battles between landowners, who competed for tourists by sabotaging competitors’ caves.

None of the topics was directly related to the students’ work on campus, which, according to Maclachlan, was exactly the point.

“It’s meant to put them out of their comfort zone,” said Maclachlan. “You want them to be a little unsure, to force them to learn how to work it out.”

He says the experience, though short in duration, had a profound effect on the students.

“Some have already talked about going back to Kentucky in the summer to help conservationists count bats,” he said. “The trip really engrossed them in the vastness of nature.”

Organizers in both Integrated Science and Arts & Science are already planning more joint, experiential learning modules, which they hope to make part of a new course.

“This sort of learning is really outside the realm of normal,” said Integrated Science program director Carolyn Eyles. “The development of a new course likes this gives us a flexible way to help students grow.”

Her colleague, Arts & Science program director Jean Wilson, says a great deal of the initiative’s value is in the blending of students from the two programs.

“Including students from both programs really makes this special, and opens up new perspectives for all of them,” she said. “Every minute of the trip contributes to your learning, and that’s powerful.”

The students are currently working on post-trip reflections, which have taken on many forms, including a blog kept by Smrke and a rap written by Godfrey.

If the full course is approved, students in the two programs will have the opportunity to enroll in learning modules each worth one unit. Three units would make up a full course.